Raised Eyebrows for a Hotel on the Outskirts

A new hotel is making a neighborhood suspicious.Credit
Rob Bennett for The New York Times

There are no heralded restaurants or strobe-lit nightclubs nearby. The area has no tourist attractions. Finding a yellow cab would be akin to spotting a U.F.O.

Still, a hotel is in the final stage of construction in a remote stretch of Hunts Point, wedged between the Sheridan Expressway and the Bronx River. Neighbors of the four-story, butter yellow building, which will have at least 60 rooms, include a body repair shop, a boiler repair outfit and a junkyard.

But rather than hailing the hotel as an economic boon to the gritty industrial area, community leaders wish it would simply go away.

“Who in their right mind is going to come from Oklahoma and stay in a location like that?” demanded Francisco Gonzalez, the district manager of Community Board 9. “It’s a deleterious location.”

Central among local concerns, said Albert Alvarez, chief of staff to City Councilman Joel Rivera of the Bronx, is that “this hotel, opening up in an area that’s pretty much desolate, is going to be a haven of prostitution and drugs.”

Last month, Adolfo Carrión Jr., the Bronx borough president, wrote to the hotel’s representatives, expressing reservations about its viability for business travelers or tourists.

He also asked the Buildings Department to impose a one-year moratorium on permits issued to hotels and motels in similarly zoned manufacturing districts, which allow commercial uses.

The hotel, which is on a service road leading to the expressway, was built legally under existing zoning regulations. But Mr. Gonzalez of the community board hopes that it will never be allowed to open. “We’ve worked for too many years to change the borough’s image to allow a hotel that would detract from that,” he said.

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